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LAST WEEK A MAJOR security flaw surfaced on Facebook that affected official pages on the service for companies, including Coca-Cola and Google. The attack launched on those pages exploited the defect via an application called Sendible – the creation of South African Gavin Hammar. Sendible wasn’t to blame for any wrongdoing but the event focused a spotlight on the company just as this journalist was preparing to write a report about it.
Sendible is a converged messaging platform for the social networking era. It combines email, SMS, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms for unified messaging, allowing businesses to schedule and consolidate their communications across many online platforms. The market it operates in is currently hot – and Sendible is unique in the sector.
Hammar began creating the service in 2008. “My father asked me to write some desktop software that would allow him to schedule emails. I built the software in my spare time in such a way it would make it easy to send any type of message, not just email. I’d worked previously for a small software company where we built robust messaging applications for the banking industry and I used my experience to develop Sendible.
“I decided to release Sendible as a web application and soon after launch the site was reviewed by top tech blogs, such as Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and Lifehacker. It was also reviewed by WebUser magazine in Britain.”
Hammar was working for a software consultancy in London at the time Sendible began attracting attention. His bosses agreed to exchange a shareholding in the project for allowing Hammar to pursue it as a business while continuing to work for them. Six months later he quit his job and bought back all the shareholding after another three months.
Sendible is now profitable and is picking up users at a rate of knots. It had more than 40 000 users when I began discussing it with Hammar about two months ago. It’s probably eclipsed that number after hitting the headlines.
“I’d prefer not to disclose revenue, but in the eight months since quitting my job to work on Sendible fulltime it’s now profitable. Approximately 2% to 3% of our users are paying customers at US$10 to $40/month,” says Hammar.
He bootstrapped the company without any investment capital. “Sendible has relied solely on word of mouth and we’re going to start investing heavily in sales and marketing to increase awareness of our product. Our goal is to become the number one marketing tool for small businesses,” Hammar says.
A former Capetonian who studied business and computer sciences at UCT, Hammar worked for the Foschini Group for four years before moving to London. “I’ve always been entrepreneurial and launched a restaurant review site called DineOnline in SA. I shut the site down when I moved to London.”
Sendible is a converged messaging platform for the social networking era. It combines email, SMS, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms for unified messaging, allowing businesses to schedule and consolidate their communications across many online platforms. The market it operates in is currently hot – and Sendible is unique in the sector.
Hammar began creating the service in 2008. “My father asked me to write some desktop software that would allow him to schedule emails. I built the software in my spare time in such a way it would make it easy to send any type of message, not just email. I’d worked previously for a small software company where we built robust messaging applications for the banking industry and I used my experience to develop Sendible.
“I decided to release Sendible as a web application and soon after launch the site was reviewed by top tech blogs, such as Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and Lifehacker. It was also reviewed by WebUser magazine in Britain.”
Hammar was working for a software consultancy in London at the time Sendible began attracting attention. His bosses agreed to exchange a shareholding in the project for allowing Hammar to pursue it as a business while continuing to work for them. Six months later he quit his job and bought back all the shareholding after another three months.
Sendible is now profitable and is picking up users at a rate of knots. It had more than 40 000 users when I began discussing it with Hammar about two months ago. It’s probably eclipsed that number after hitting the headlines.
“I’d prefer not to disclose revenue, but in the eight months since quitting my job to work on Sendible fulltime it’s now profitable. Approximately 2% to 3% of our users are paying customers at US$10 to $40/month,” says Hammar.
He bootstrapped the company without any investment capital. “Sendible has relied solely on word of mouth and we’re going to start investing heavily in sales and marketing to increase awareness of our product. Our goal is to become the number one marketing tool for small businesses,” Hammar says.
A former Capetonian who studied business and computer sciences at UCT, Hammar worked for the Foschini Group for four years before moving to London. “I’ve always been entrepreneurial and launched a restaurant review site called DineOnline in SA. I shut the site down when I moved to London.”
